The Demon Breaks His Sunglasses
by athousandelegies
Summary: Aziraphale visits Crowley's flat to find the demon bruised and battered from an encounter with Hastur.


"Crowley! Oh, Crowley, thank God! …Er."

"Hey, angel," Crowley said weakly.

He made an attempt at his trademark roguish, devil-may-care smile, but it came out as a sickly grimace. He tried to pull himself to his feet, and grunted as white-hot pain raced up his side. Reflexively, he curled up on himself, his arms hugging his stomach.

"Crowley, oh, here, let me see. Come _on_, please dear, let me _see_." The demon's frantic and exhausted mind had reverted to a more instinctive thought process, and every fibre of his being screamed at him to flee from the angel, his Predator. But he was too drained to put up much of a struggle; he allowed the plump, manicured fingers of his natural Enemy to pry his arms away from his stomach and gently unbutton his tattered shirt to reveal the damage beneath.

"Oh, my poor dear, what did they do to you?" Aziraphale murmured in dismay.

His torso was a patchwork of bruises, ranging from brown to deep purple to almost black. That a good number of ribs were broken was certain. Crowley could tell that one had punctured his left lung. As the adrenaline blocking his pain receptors began to fade, the internal damage became more patent; Crowley thought he'd black out from the pain.

"Angel...Aziraphale, please," he gasped, in too much agony to worry about sounding tough. "It hurts, Az. Please. Make it…make it ssstop."

A hand filled his bleary vision, he felt a warm touch on his head, and then, at last, the searing pain was gone, faded away like a bad dream.

Shakily, he sat up. "Thanksss."

"Not at all, my dear," the angel said, concern and tenderness shimmering in his cerulean eyes. He proffered his hand and pulled the still-quivering demon up off the floor. With Crowley's arm propped across his shoulders and a good amount of his weight leaning into the angel, Aziraphale helped his friend hobble into the living room to sink onto the sofa, which had been miraculously restored to an undamaged state (the plants were all returned to health as well, tucked neatly into unbroken pots as if nothing had ever disturbed them).

The demon made no complaint as the angel took his hand and held it tightly. Aziraphale was as shaky as he, the horror of seeing his one enduring companion lying corpselike on the floor still vivid in his mind.

Neither spoke for a few minutes, simply leaning into one another, each quietly taking comfort in the other's presence.

Aziraphale was replaying the scene in his head as his nerves worked to steady themselves. He had let himself in to the demon's flat when his increasingly impatient knocks had remained unanswered. He'd found the place in utter disarray, the sofa torn to shreds and plant pots shattered, dirt spilling across the floor. And then he had found Crowley (his sunglasses lying mangled several feet away from him, their lenses ground into powder), slumped over on his kitchen floor with a black eye and a shredded suit and blood dripping heavily from a split lip onto the cold white tiles. He'd been lying very, very still, and for one heart-stopping moment Aziraphale had thought he was dead (forgetting in panic that in that case his friend would simply have been discorporated).

As Crowley's heart returned to a somewhat steady beat, he gently extricated his hand from the angel's and casually leaned the other way so that they were no longer touching. Their sentimental moment had lasted long enough, he figured. As soon as he could muster the energy to conjure up a new pair of shades and fix up his woefully ragged clothes, he'd feel like his old demonic self again and everything would be back to normal, no more sappy cuddling sessions.

Aziraphale too had managed to calm down, having reminded himself that at the worst Crowley would have been discorporated for a few years, not been dead forever. "Well, my dear…what _happened_?"

"Oh, you know," Crowley said offhandedly, his expression carefully blank, "Hastur and some of his cronies stopped by for a little _chat_. And you know us demons, we're pretty fond of roughhousing. So yeah, they tossed me around a bit, the jokers." He forced a laugh even though he felt more like puking. "Don't worry, you should have seen the damage_ I_ did _them_. Two of them were stupid enough to have their wings out; they won't be flying again any time soon."

Aziraphale felt ill. "But Crowley…what did they want?"

"Oh, payback, I suppose," the demon replied carelessly. "You know, for Ligur. Not to mention my role in the whole preventing the end of the world thing. They were trying to get me discorporated, so they could drag my sorry arse back to hell. But I threatened them, told them I had my sprinkler system chock-full of holy water and all I had to do was pull the fire alarm to melt us all into sizzling oblivion. That sent 'em running."

It was quiet for a moment, and Crowley fought to keep the hysteria from his voice as he continued, "Let's see, what was it that Hastur said exactly? Something about how the hellhounds could use a new chew toy…oh, yeah, and that 'having a traitorous, human-loving, pathetic excuse for a demon chained to the leg of his desk for all eternity' would provide him with no end of entertainment."

The silence this time was uncomfortable, as both of them imagined what being chained to Hastur's desk for all eternity would entail.

"…I don't think you're a pathetic excuse for demon," Aziraphale said soothingly. "You're plenty scary, my dear. Simply terrifying. Very devious, and _very_ evil, of course; remember the time you tied up the post all across England for the whole week before Christmas? Chaos everywhere, and everybody cross about not having their presents delivered on time. _And_ you made that one newscaster slip up on live TV and say that Santa wasn't real for children all over Britain to hear."

"That _was_ pretty good, wasn't it?" he grinned nostalgically. And paused. "Thanks, angel."

"Now, I don't know about you, but I could do with getting completely smashed tonight," the angel said.

"Are _you_ tempting _me_ to drink myself blind? Why, angel, how utterly wicked of you," Crowley said with a smirk.

"Just go on and get changed, dear. I'd help fix up your clothes, but I'm afraid I'm all miracled out for the night. Plus, I'd probably get the design wrong somehow; you're ever so picky."

"Yeah, I'll let you help me with my wardrobe the day I _want_ to walk around in a suit composed entirely of tartan," Crowley scoffed, and slithered off the sofa with a small groan. "And if that day ever comes, angel," he added as he slunk off to his bedroom, "you have my permission to kill me."

Too exhausted to will an outfit onto his body, he had to get dressed the old-fashioned way, almost falling over as he attempted to get his legs into a pair of trousers and buttoning up a fresh shirt with clumsy fingers. He put on his spare pair of sunglasses and smiled, feeling comfortably like himself again.

Aziraphale tutted when Crowley returned to the living room. "Dear, you've gotten the buttons all wrong. Here, let me."

"What do you mean, I got them _wrong_?" Crowley spluttered as the angel stood in front of him and proceeded to unbutton and re-button the demon's shirt for him. "How can you get buttons _wrong_?"

"You skipped the bottom buttonhole, dear, and the whole shirt's crooked because of it."

"Oh." Well, it was hard doing things by hand; he wasn't a _human_ after all.

"There," Aziraphale said triumphantly, stepping back and looking the demon up and down. "No bruises, no blood, suit impeccable, sunglasses in place—" they both smiled at that—"you're as dashing as ever, old friend."

"Yeah, yeah, no need to get sappy now," Crowley said affectionately. It always gave him a secret joy to hear the angel call him _friend_, not that he'd admit it even to himself. "Let's be off, shall we? And I hope you don't mind if I crash at your place tonight."

"Be my guest, dear. Off we go." And the two stepped out the flat and outside to where the Bentley was waiting for them.


End file.
